As of this edit, you have no Forum folder whatsoever. When you upload that folder, the rendering of your forum will enable itself. Then you can tweak it to fit your needs.

« Last Edit: Jul 3rd, 2013 at 4:57pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

what's happening is that the folder and files are there, 100% guarenteed they are where they should be - BUT invisible to general html - the forum software can see them unless it's trying to read the html template file.

Ie: I can play with the style sheets in that folder and edit the templates in that folder. But they become invisible when it tries read them to apply the html template.

So I'm going to delete the forum template folder and re-upload very carefully.

You're sort of right - in that you can't see the forum folder - even though it's definitely there.

(5 minutes later - create new - empty - Templates/Forum directory) Ah ha - new forum directory is now visible and accessible through html. Right - walk the dogs and then put all the crap back and keep fingers crossed.

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

get it into your head that the forum directory was there ALL THE TIME (even when there were two yabbfile folders, all the right files were in the right place). It just wasn't visible via html.

So while your fix should work - your reasoning was partly wrong

I'm emphasizing this because the odds are it'll happen again with somebody else and just repeating: 'the folder is not there' - when the other person can clearly see it and access it and show it to you, isn't quite as useful as you think it is

The thing is, you did manage to create your Forum folder where it belongs, and it did appear as I explained it would.

Bottom line: Whether that folder was seen, hidden as you say it was, or whatever, YaBB couldn't access it, and that's what mattered.

Please remember that I've had the same exact problem as you have/had, and so have others. The result has always been the same. I and others thought files were in a certain folder on the server when in fact they had actually been uploaded in the wrong place.

This is a very common error that baffles people even when it's explained to them. In any case, you seem to have a handle on it now, so you should be good to go in due time.

Have fun with your forum!

Edited:

Here's something that might give you a good laugh. I laughed about it, but only after I had first cried in frustration.

I have a folder on our server titled Theatre that shows up perfectly fine, but isn't always accessible. To some it is. To others it isn't.

My crazy solution was to duplicate that folder, which I titled theatre ... same spelling, but without the capitalization.

I know this is a Unix thing, but still, this is the only folder I've had to manage this way.

I'm glad I can laugh about it now.

« Last Edit: Jul 3rd, 2013 at 5:24pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

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Bill, what I'm betting happened in your instance - you're doing your editing in Windows which normally has a case-insensitive file-system. In your links to whatever was in the folder you probably had both 'Theater/' and 'theater/'. But when the files and folder were transferred to a *nix system, one of those sets of links stopped working because while Windows usually thinks Theater and theater are the same, *nix knows better.

I get caught with that all the time - I actually have a little program that will rename to lower-case all the (non-YaBB) files I need to upload so they don't 'suddenly' go 404 on me - plus I simply now have the habit of only using lower-case links. (unless it's YaBB. )

If you only have one solution to a problem you're not trying hard enough!

Thank you very much for explaining this. Your help is really appreciated.

By the way, your "habit of only using lower-case links" is what I also do just so I won't make this same mistake again.

Great advice!

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

well actually it was none of those things - and while I know exactly what happened (just not why), so far there isn't a sensible explanation.

When I deleted the existing Forum folder and created a new one - the new one showed up. UNTIL I put files into it and changed the chmod to the same as all the other folders and files (755 & 644) At which point the Forum folder vanished from html again. Much banging of heads on walls insued.

However, being an afficianado of murphys law I decided to ignore what 'should' be and just create the Fourm folder without any changes to the chmod. And that worked.I then uploaded the template and css files - again without messing with the chmods. And they remained visible to html.So currently I've got the folders and files with default chmod and they are visible.

so folders are 775 and files are 664. If I change them they turn invisible (still there bill, just invisible).

ALL other files and folders including the Templates/Admin folder are standard chmod 755 & 644

And so far it's working. Before I moved the Templates/Forum folder had 755 & 644 permissions. Go figure.

So thanks for all your help guys - even if an idea isn't right, it got my brain thinking in the right direction.

You just need to remember with computers - what 'should work' be isn't neccessarily what does work

So just got to get my navigation menu back (and I saw a thread on just that subject on here ) and I think we'll be back to normal.

So thanks for all your help guys - even if an idea isn't right, it got my brain thinking in the right direction.

Ah, so it was a permissions issue. Thanks very much for that clarification. Your personal experience is actually a huge help, which I'm particularly grateful for since I can now stop scratching my head about it.

What I did know for sure was that your Forum folder was missing here where it should have been. Or more accurately as it's been pointed out, evidently a permissions issue made that folder and its accompanying files invisible. Not just to the naked eye, but to YaBB itself, which couldn't find them to properly render the forum.

I've happily been using YaBB since 2002, and even to this day, I'm still learning something new. What an interestingly frustrating dilemma.

Edited:

Seeing curious aardvark's great looking forum reminded me that there are YaBB forums where there's no registration menu icon. This of course is because admins are tired of dealing with spam-bot registrations, and many admins still don't know that this no longer has to be a problem for YaBB.

Thankfully, there's a relatively easy fix to stop spam-bots cold.

Meanwhile, admins can easily enough put back their registration menu icon so that guests will know how to register.

All an admin needs to do is to use their Add a tab feature to add a Register icon to their menu. The url for that icon will simply go to a topic/post that the admin has created to explain how to register.

If the admin instructs registrants to provide them with their chosen User ID via email, and maybe their chosen displayed name, the admin can give them "a temporary password" so that a membership can be created. That member can then access their User CP to make it their own.

« Last Edit: Jul 4th, 2013 at 3:46pm by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

All an admin needs to do is to use their Add a tab feature to add a Register icon to their menu. The url for that icon will simply go to a topic/post that the admin has created to explain how to register.

If the admin instructs registrants to provide them with their chosen User ID via email, and maybe their chosen displayed name, the admin can give them "a temporary password" so that a membership can be created. That member can then access their User CP to make it their own.

OOh - now that's a bloody good idea - glad I cam back now

Yeah slinging.org has been around for over 10 years now - so every spider, webbot, spambot and chinese college student knows where we are. We even had to totally remove the registration page (even though there was no link on the forum) as it was getting hit so often we were drawing 3x as much cpu time on the server as we are allowed.

Before I shut down the self registration - during the great spam attack of 2011 - we were getting around 10 spam accounts registered every MINUTE. basically 5 of us were spending 4-5 hours a day doing nothing but removing spam, and some of it was really really nasty porn images. we're talking animals, things, you name it.

Since removing self registration - 0 spam posts in 20 months.

Thats: ZERO spam accounts.

Takes me a few minutes most days to sign up any new members and the other mods are free to do things like setup faq and index threads, which we never had the time or inclination to do when spam was around.

But a registration button that goes to a email me thread - I like that :

See I said you were helpful

Now if I can only get images and avatars to display I'll be 99.9% there. But that's a seperate thread

ps: where do i find the 'add a tab feature' ?

I've done it with html through the template before but I like the idea of a set menu option to do it instead.

YaBB install help video1. what yabb forum are you running and the url2. describe in as much detail as you can what happens and also post screenshots if you can3. please be patient we live in different time zones and have other commitments but we will help youas bill and ted say (Be excellent to each other)

Since January of 2012 we've had 0 spam-bot posts, and ZERO spam accounts even though we have Open registration without approvals. Not only that, we allow Guest Posting.

Keep in mind that we've had many hundreds of thousands of spam-bot registration attempts, all of which have been stopped cold!We're able to do this because of ggn's anti-spam CAPTCHA hack.

Thankfully, Derek Barnstorm authored this hack into a mod with ggn's proud and happy approval, and lead developer Dandello has included it in YaBB's next version. You can see it in action by going to the General Board of Dandello's test bed forum, and scrolling down near the bottom.

« Last Edit: Jul 7th, 2013 at 1:46am by Bill Myers »

Morning, noon, or night, have a great one!

Note: Like most others, this forum doesn't allow us to freely edit our posts or topics to make corrections as needed, so please remember to look for subsequent posts if you see any mistakes or outdated information. Sorry for the inconvenience.